Prisoner swapping: Trading in vulnerable lives

Catch an inmate who has devised some ingenious means to pass a drugs test, and a jailer has every right to come down hard. But when inspections are fiddled by the jailers themselves, the consequences are altogether more serious. The governors at Wandsworth and Pentonville have been caught swapping disturbed prisoners in advance of inspection in the same way that lags might respond to rumours of dope screening by exchanging secretly stowed urine samples.

Sometimes in taxis, sometimes in vans, vulnerable prisoners with medical and other problems were casually shunted between the two jails, either side of inspections this summer. The aim, presumably, was to flatter the impression their institutions created by making their most troubled cases vanish. Shrouding difficulties in darkness is always a scandal in any public service. Taxpayers fund jails, as they do schools and hospitals, and are entitled to know what is going wrong within prison walls, as well as what is going right. Just as in schools and hospitals, flinging a veil over a problem pretty much ensures it will not be tackled.

Far more than in schools and hospitals, though, within places of detention there is a particular risk that darkness will foster cruelty. That is why there are international human rights obligations in respect of the prisons inspector, but not in connection with Ofsted. The gravity of what is at stake is evident in what happened to the handful of inmates shunted back and forth from Wandsworth – one took an overdose and another was found alive in his cell with self-inflicted wounds and a ligature round his neck. There are also questions about the role that moving may have played in the successful suicide of a third prisoner who moved in and out of the jail at much the same time, although not originally as part of the group transfer.

The risks should have been known to the then governors of both Pentonville and Wandsworth, who – ironically in the light of the misconduct charges now faced – both led their prisons through many improvements. The first few days in a new jail are the moment of maximum danger in terms of suicide and self-harm, a fact routinely recorded in the chief inspector's annual report, and one which makes the casual reassignment of prisoners for reasons of institutional spin all the more disgraceful.

The professionals must of course explain themselves – or take the rap. But if their moral moorings slipped, it is worth asking whether this happened because they worked in a system in which redeployments are frequently used to manage unmanageable pressures. And that, like so much else that is wrong with our jails, comes back to endemic overcrowding.